AdvanceTec AT-FX Wahdita review

Taking up the discarded mantle of the top £1,000 PC

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Our Verdict

The 4870x2 keeps the frame rates up, giving excellent performance at the right price point

For

Good price…

…with excellent performance

Quality motherboard base

Against

Slightly weak CPU

A couple of months back we looked at the Warbird from YoyoTech, another 4870x2-powered machine that made mincemeat out of the current crop of triple-A title games.

At the time the £1,000 pricepoint was incredible, but unfortunately that's exactly what it turned out to be.

Citing the failing economy as the major factor the price of the Warbird has been raised, if you then need an OS installed as well, this all makes the price closer to £1,300 than the original £1,000 pricepoint. The AdvanceTec AT-FX Wahdita however is stuck ﬁrmly at the £1K mark.

Behind the jaw-dropping price

So what gives? Well, the 4870x2 is still there, but the sacriﬁce has come in the shape of half the storage (an ample 500GB) and the processor. The Warbird packs a beefy Q9550 clocked in at around 3.8GHz, a heavyweight chip and that accounted for much of the cost and a substantial part of the performance.

The AT-FX though is sporting the cheaper, slim line, Q8200; effectively the 45nm replacement for the 65nm Q6600. It clocks in at 2.33GHz, but AdvanceTec has it running happily at 3GHz.

The serious Asus cooling tower atop this Intel CPU could probably have the wee chip performing above the 3GHz mark with some judicious tweaking and a bit of overclocking nouse.

It's this processor then that accounts for the slightly lower performance ﬁgures, as well as a substantial part of the savings. But then we're still talking about system performance that can put other £1,500 NVIDIA-based machines in the shade, and it will still have you gaming at jaw-dropping resolutions.

Powerful motherboard

Amidst the less expensive components, though, AdvanceTec hasn't stinted on the motherboard.

The P5Q Deluxe is a great platform for future upgrades (Core i7 notwithstanding) and includes the solid state-installed ExpressGate setup for quick booting into a basic OS. And talking of operating systems, the pre-installed 64-bit version of Vista is perfect for these memory heavy times of ours and is itself ripe and ready for an upgrade once Windows 7 rolls around.

In these budget-conscious times of ours, it may feel strange buying a full rig instead of upgrading, but AdvanceTec has created an intelligently built powerhouse in the AT-FX Wahdita.